Ch 5Print Culture and the Modern World

Chapter 5: Print Culture and the Modern World

Print is everywhere around us, yet it has a history that shaped the modern world. This chapter traces the development of print from its beginnings in East Asia to its expansion in Europe and India, and shows how the coming of print transformed religion, politics and society.

1. The First Printed Books: East Asia

• The earliest print technology — hand printing from woodblocks — developed in China, Japan and Korea. From AD 594, books in China were printed by rubbing paper against the inked surface of woodblocks; the "accordion book" was folded and stitched at the side.
• The imperial state of China was the major producer of printed material for its civil service examinations. By the 17th century, print diversified — merchants used it in trade, and fictional narratives, poetry, autobiographies and romantic plays appeared; reading became a leisure activity, and women began publishing their poetry and plays.
• Western printing techniques and mechanical presses were imported into China in the late 19th century; Shanghai became the hub of the new print culture.
• Japan: Buddhist missionaries from China introduced hand-printing into Japan around AD 768-770. The oldest Japanese printed book is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra (AD 868), containing six sheets of text and woodcut illustrations. In medieval Edo (Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings depicted urban life; the art of ukiyo ("pictures of the floating world") by artists like Kitagawa Utamaro was widely circulated.

2. Print Comes to Europe

• Marco Polo, the Italian explorer, returned from China in 1295 and brought back the knowledge of woodblock printing; the technology spread through Italy to other parts of Europe.
• Demand for books grew, but hand-copied manuscripts could not satisfy it — copying was expensive, laborious, time-consuming, and manuscripts were fragile and hard to carry. Woodblock printing became popular for textiles, playing cards and religious pictures.
• Gutenberg and the printing press: Johann Gutenberg of Strasbourg, the son of a merchant, adapted existing technologies — the olive press provided the model, and moulds were used for casting metal types for the letters of the alphabet. By 1448 he perfected the system; the first book he printed was the Bible (about 180 copies in 3 years). Printed books at first resembled manuscripts — borders were illuminated by hand and space for decoration was left blank for buyers to choose designs.
• Between 1450 and 1550, printing presses were set up in most countries of Europe; the second half of the 15th century saw 20 million printed books, rising to about 200 million in the 16th century. This shift from hand printing to mechanical printing is called the print revolution.

3. The Print Revolution and Its Impact

• A new reading public: printing reduced the cost of books; books flooded the market. Earlier there was a hearing culture (sacred texts read out, ballads recited); now a reading culture emerged. Since literacy was low, printers published illustrated ballads and folk tales, sung and recited in villages and taverns — the line between oral and reading cultures blurred.
• Religious debates and the fear of print: many feared that if there was no control over what was printed and read, rebellious and irreligious thoughts would spread. In 1517, the religious reformer Martin Luther wrote his Ninety Five Theses criticising the corrupt practices of the Catholic Church; printed copies spread rapidly, leading to a division within the Church and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Luther said: "Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one."
• Print and dissent: print led to distinctive individual interpretations of faith. Menocchio, an Italian miller, reinterpreted the Bible and was executed by the Roman Church. The Church imposed controls over publishers and booksellers and, from 1558, maintained an Index of Prohibited Books.
• The reading mania (17th-18th centuries): literacy rates went up; churches set up schools; new forms of literature appeared — almanacs, chapbooks (pocket-size books sold by pedlars called chapmen in England), the "Bibliotheque Bleue" in France (cheap books on poor-quality paper with blue covers), periodical press, newspapers and journals. Ideas of scientists and philosophers — Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau — became accessible to common people.
• "Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world!" — by the mid-18th century many believed books were a means of spreading progress and enlightenment that would liberate society from despotism; the novelist Louise-Sebastien Mercier declared, "The printing press is the most powerful engine of progress."
• Print culture and the French Revolution: (i) print popularised the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers (Voltaire, Rousseau) who attacked tradition, superstition, despotism and the authority of the Church; (ii) print created a new culture of dialogue and debate — all values and institutions were re-evaluated by a public that had become aware of the power of reason; (iii) by the 1780s, literature mocked royalty and criticised their morality, raising questions about the existing social order. Print did not directly cause the revolution, but it opened the possibility of thinking differently.

4. The Nineteenth Century: New Readers

• Children: primary education became compulsory in the late 19th century; a children's press was set up in France (1857); the Grimm Brothers in Germany compiled traditional folk tales (published 1812), editing out what was thought unsuitable for children.
• Women: became important readers and writers; penny magazines and manuals on housekeeping were meant for them; famous novelists — Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot — defined a new type of woman: a person with will, strength of personality, determination and the power to think.
• Workers: lending libraries (which had existed from the 17th century) became instruments for educating white-collar workers, artisans and lower-middle-class people; after the working day shortened, workers wrote political tracts and autobiographies.
• Further innovations: by the late 18th century the press was made of metal. Richard M. Hoe of New York perfected the power-driven cylindrical press (8,000 sheets per hour); the offset press printed up to six colours at a time; from the turn of the 20th century, electrically operated presses accelerated printing. Publishers brought out cheap Shilling Series, the paper-back "dust cover", and serialised novels in periodicals.

5. India and the World of Print

• Manuscripts before print: India had a very rich tradition of handwritten manuscripts — in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and vernacular languages — copied on palm leaves or handmade paper, pressed between wooden covers or sewn. Manuscripts were expensive, fragile and difficult to read, so they were not widely used in everyday life.
• The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-16th century (about 1556). Jesuit priests printed tracts in Konkani; by 1674 about 50 books had been printed in Konkani and Kanara languages; Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in 1579 at Cochin and the first Malayalam book in 1713.
• James Augustus Hickey began editing the Bengal Gazette from 1780 — a weekly magazine described as "a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none". Hickey published a lot of advertisements and gossip about the Company's senior officials; Governor-General Warren Hastings persecuted him. The first Indian-published Indian newspaper was also called the Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya.
• Religious reform and public debates: printed tracts and newspapers spread new ideas and shaped debates over matters like widow immolation, monotheism, Brahmanical priesthood and idolatry. Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 1821; the Hindu orthodoxy countered with the Samachar Chandrika. Two Persian newspapers, Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar, appeared from 1822, and a Gujarati newspaper, the Bombay Samachar, the same year.
• The ulama of North India, fearing colonial rulers would change Muslim personal laws, used cheap lithographic presses to publish Persian and Urdu translations of holy scriptures and religious newspapers; the Deoband Seminary (founded 1867) published thousands upon thousands of fatwas telling Muslim readers how to conduct everyday lives.
• Among Hindus, print encouraged reading of religious texts in vernacular languages — the first printed edition of Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas came out from Calcutta in 1810; the Naval Kishore Press at Lucknow and the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay published numerous cheap religious texts. Print connected communities in different parts of India and created pan-Indian identities.
• New forms of publication: the novel, lyrics, short stories, essays about social and political matters; visual culture flourished — cheap prints and calendars by painters like Raja Ravi Varma; by the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons commented on society and politics in journals.

6. Women, the Poor and Print

• Women: liberal husbands and fathers educated women at home or sent them to schools; but conservatives feared an educated girl would be widowed (Hindus) or corrupted by Urdu romances (Muslims). Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl, learnt to read secretly and wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban (published 1876) — the first full-length autobiography in the Bengali language. From the 1860s, writers like Kailashbashini Debi wrote about women's experiences; in the 1880s Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows. In Punjab, folk literature taught women to be obedient wives; in Bengal, the Battala area of Calcutta printed cheap popular books that women could read in their leisure time.
• The poor and caste: very cheap small books were sold at crossroads in 19th-century Madras towns; public libraries opened in the early 20th century. Caste discrimination began to be written about — Jyotiba Phule, the Marathi pioneer of "low-caste" protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his Gulamgiri (1871); in the 20th century B.R. Ambedkar (Maharashtra) and E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) (Madras) wrote powerfully on caste, and their writings were read by people all over India. Workers too wrote: Kashibaba, a Kanpur millworker, wrote Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal (1938); Bangalore cotton millworkers set up libraries to educate themselves.

7. Print and Censorship

• Before 1798, the East India Company was not too concerned with censorship; early measures were directed against Englishmen who criticised Company misrule. By the 1820s the Calcutta Supreme Court passed regulations to control press freedom; but in 1835, faced with petitions, Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise press laws and Thomas Macaulay formulated new rules restoring earlier freedoms.
• After the Revolt of 1857, the attitude changed — enraged Englishmen demanded a clamp-down on the "native" press.
• The Vernacular Press Act, 1878, modelled on the Irish Press Laws, gave the government extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press: if a report was judged seditious, the newspaper was warned, and if the warning was ignored, the press could be seized and the printing machinery confiscated.
• Despite repression, nationalist newspapers grew and reported on colonial misrule. When Punjab revolutionaries were deported in 1907, Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote with great sympathy about them in his Kesari, leading to his imprisonment in 1908 and provoking widespread protests.

Timeline of Important Dates and Events